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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117055">but i owe it to my brothers, to carry them home</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/carterhaugh/pseuds/carterhaugh'>carterhaugh</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>i ran like a speeding train [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>BioShock 1 &amp; 2 (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Atlas is Frank Fontaine, Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, Jack-Centric, M/M, Period-Typical Transphobia, Possibly Unrequited Love, Sexism, Trans Jack, Trans Male Author, Trans Male Character, Would You Kindly (BioShock), some internalised transphobia, someday. i will write something in which nobody is called jack</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 11:41:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,636</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117055</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/carterhaugh/pseuds/carterhaugh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There's still so much that Jack doesn't know about himself.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Atlas/Jack (BioShock)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>i ran like a speeding train [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2151171</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>but i owe it to my brothers, to carry them home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rapture is a very different world to the one he knows, Jack thinks, rifling through the pockets of a newly-dead Splicer. </p><p>The lights so bright, the music so loud, everywhere a sign proclaiming some new miracle. Even amongst the wreckage there’s an overflow of expensive champagne and more expensive drugs, all about a thousand miles away from a quiet existence in rural Kansas. The days there blur into one long honeyed summer when he looks back on them now, slow and grassy, nothing like the gunpowder flare of the last few hours.</p><p>Hurts his head to think about, really. The sheer distances he's crossed, both literally and figuratively, in such a short amount of time.</p><p>The radio at his hip crackles. "Enjoying yourself, boyo?”</p><p>It seems he’s been stood still for some time now, just staring up at the gilded facades that slowly crumble around him. Jack nods, then realises belatedly that Atlas can't hear it. "Sorry," he says, "I've just... never seen anything like it. The biggest place I’ve been in was Hesston, maybe, or Iola.”</p><p>“Y’should’ve seen her when she was alive,” Atlas tells him. “The best and the brightest all down here at once, parties every night, and a city full to the very <em>brim</em> with opportunity.” The radio dissolves into static as he sighs. “Back then, felt like we were going to live forever.”</p><p>“I don’t know about that,” Jack replies, honestly. “I was never too grand at parties.” More of the type to stand still and awkward near the door.</p><p>When Atlas laughs, Jack focuses on the warm indistinct hiss of it, committing it to memory.</p><p>“You’d be surprised, the things you might find you like down here,” he says.</p><p>*</p><p>The medical pavilion went surprisingly well, all things considered.</p><p>There’s something in him, some instinctive part, that knows just what to do when it’s handed a gun or a knife or a wrench. There’s something rhythmic about it, like a dance, like a muscle memory stored deep within, that causes his muscles and tendons to bunch and stretch and bring down a blunt object in a sure arc directly onto Dr. Steinman’s head.  The details are always a bit fuzzy, after, but it’s not something he’s exactly resentful of.</p><p>Jack’s beginning to think, though, that it’s not just the ruined luxury that’s going to shock him about Rapture.</p><p>He’s not ignorant, but he knows he’s been pretty sheltered, and that counts for even more in a city with no gods, no kings, and no ethical constraints. He’s not entirely sure what goes on inside, but he can guess what the posters for Eve’s Garden are advertising. He’s found some fairly scandalous diaries. And Dr. Steinman’s audio logs are full of impossibilities, moral incredulities, <em>change your look change your race change your sex.</em></p><p>It’s that last one he keeps thinking of, for some reason. There are so many bodies, piled up in the streets and draped over chairs in back rooms. Men with soft jaws, women angular in the flickering light. Everyone an unearthly kind of beautiful. <em>Change your sex,</em> croons Dr. Steinman’s remembered voice, and he looks at every person he passes and wonders if they did, and why, and if they were happy afterward.</p><p>*</p><p>The trees of Arcadia are lush and verdant and whispering. Jack thinks he ought to dislike this place more than he does - the overgrowth provides endless cover for the people that throw themselves at him, meathooks in hand - but the trailing wisteria and camellias are a welcome break from the leaking horror that is the rest of the city. The gardens, at least, are only lovelier for their time spent unchecked; if he doesn’t look up, he can almost pretend he’s above ground again.</p><p>The pretence gets harder as Jack descends further in. The lower paths are waterlogged in a way that he’s come to expect, but it’s not too grand to have to stop and empty his boots of muck and mire and whatever debris has crept into them. It reminds Jack oddly of scraping them clean on the fence as he moved about his chores on the farm, a memory worn thin with habit. He’s glad of his jumper now, though - Rapture underwater is the kind of cold that sinks into your bones.</p><p>Jack’s less glad of it when the Splicers he encounters start getting creative, tossing blades and spikes and random bits of metal in his general direction. The blood begins to pool in half-a-dozen places through the wool, matting the fibres with rust and generally pulling painfully whenever he lifts his arm. After the third time he misses the handhold up to a ledge because of it, Jack ducks into one of the small bathrooms that are dotted around the Tea Gardens.</p><p>Once he’s inside, Jack pulls off his jumper and sets to work disinfecting the cuts. He’s gotten lucky - there are a lot of them, but they’re small and not that deep, as if he’s been rolling in shattered glass. It’s not as painful as it could be; the old scar tissue on his chest deadens a reasonable amount of sensation, which helps to lessen the amount of pain he has to deal with. The good side of an old injury, Jack supposes, though now he thinks about it, he can’t quite remember how he got it. A childhood accident, he assumes, something long forgotten either through the years or from deliberately blotting it out. His parents never brought it up, so it can’t have been too bad.</p><p>The wounds are beginning to close up. Jack gives it another few minutes, to make sure the blood flow’s stopped, before tugging his jumper back over his head. Another second to check he hasn’t left anything behind, and then he goes to leave.</p><p>Jack opens the door, and nearly hits a passing Little Sister. Luckily, it doesn’t register with the Big Daddy following her, but Jack feels guilty all the same; he doesn’t want to act as judge and jury, tally up allotments of misery, but he thinks that maybe they’re the worst part of everything Rapture has done. Children who should never have been caught up in this war. It’s why Jack feels compelled to save as many as possible.</p><p>It’s the one thing he quietly disagrees with Atlas on. Jack doesn’t think Atlas means to be cruel; only that he’s learned to be ruthlessly pragmatic in a place where kindness gets you killed. But Jack is from a very different world. He knows that there will be terrible decisions coming, things that he might never be able to scrub from his conscience, but Jack won’t harvest the girls. Instead, he uses the plasmids to restore them, at least physically, to what they were before.</p><p>There’s no way to know if it helps or leaves them more unprotected, but he sets off after the girl and the Big Daddy all the same. He hopes he is doing the right thing.</p><p>As Jack follows them, hoping they’ll head to the outskirts of the Tea Garden where he can safely attack from the stairs, he considers the foliage. Some are familiar to him, honeysuckle and sweetbriar, but the starry purple flowers and several of the shrubs are strange. Imported, probably. It seems like something Ryan would care about; an artificial Eden of only those plants deemed worthy of Rapture’s underwater conservatory.</p><p>His cousins in England have gardens, Jack remembers his mother telling him. Laid out by someone called Capability Brown. Without much detail about his relatives, Jack had resorted to imagining sunny afternoons under English oaks, something carefree and a little endless. The kind of leisure he’d never had, back on the farm where there was always work to be done. Jack wonders if Atlas ever spent time in similar grounds; Ireland’s not so far from England, after all, and he must have lived there for some time before his descent into Rapture. He’ll ask, next time Atlas calls him.</p><p>Perhaps when this is all over, they’ll visit Jack’s cousins together. He’d like that.</p><p>*</p><p>“- and there was this, this shop, across from Eve’s Garden, and the things in the window -“</p><p>Atlas’s bark of a laugh sputters out over the radio. “That, boyo, I’m not explaining to you. You can find out when you’re older.”</p><p>“‘M older now,” Jack argues, very reasonably he thinks. Holed up in an office alcove, he’s taking the opportunity to rest between Fort Frolic and Hephaestus, and to bandage some of the weeping cuts on his chest; some tore badly as he fought his way through the Farmer’s Market. Out of curiosity, he’s improvised painkillers with the very dregs of a bottle of whiskey. It hasn’t done much more than make him feel talkative and a bit sleepy, but it’s settled warm in his stomach anyway. It’s a pleasant contrast to the underwater chill of Rapture.</p><p>He leans back against the wall, tips his head up. Feels bones click and release. The mirror still resting on the desk is dusty and smeared, but it manages to show him flushed with alcohol across the high points of his face and burning bright. Guilty, he looks into the camera watching him, thinks of a bathysphere imploding, looks away.</p><p>Anything seems to go, down here. But Atlas has just lost a family.</p><p>He carries the grief well. Past that initial pain, he seems to have funnelled tragedy into righteous anger, encouraging and resourceful and supportive at every turn. Jack doesn’t know what he’d do without him. He thinks he’d do anything for Atlas, if asked.</p><p>“Penny for them, lad.”</p><p>Jack shakes himself out of his reverie. “Call me Jack, please.” It’s not just wanting to be on a first-name-basis. His name matters to him, always has, he’s never wanted another. He likes the simplicity of it. Jack the storybook character. Jack the everyman. Jack the responsible farmer’s son. It seems fitting, and this far away from home he clings to it more than ever.</p><p>“Alright. Jack it is,” Atlas says. There’s a scraping sound over the radio, like he’s leaning back in a chair, his voice getting fainter.</p><p>“Anything else y’want to ask about the dubious morality of this fair city? Fulfilling my role as a guide, so to speak.”</p><p>Jack considers. There’s only one thing he can think of, though he’s unsure whether Atlas will know anything about it. He’s unsure why he’s so curious, really. But he thinks that Atlas probably meets all sorts, in the grubby reality of being a revolutionary, and so it’s probably worth a shot.</p><p>“Yes, actually,” he says. “Do you - do you know anything about… Dr. Steinman’s patients?”</p><p>The radio crackles irritably, this time. From where he’s set it on the table, it’s as if Atlas is sitting there with him in this dingy back room.</p><p>“Wasn’t too knowledgable about him, myself,” Atlas tells him. “You curious about that McClintock woman?”</p><p>“No! No,” Jack responds, hurriedly. “Not… that kind of patient.”</p><p>Something seems to click for Atlas. Jack can hear sounds of a chair moving, again, and his voice is clearer when he responds.</p><p>“What’d you want to know about them for?”Atlas asks. He sounds genuinely surprised, as Jack supposes he has a right to be, but there’s an undercurrent of something sharp to his tone.</p><p>Undeterred, Jack forges on.</p><p>“Just… wondering? I didn’t know they existed, before I came down here. I don’t think I ever met one, either.”</p><p>The radio dissolves into static as Atlas huffs half of a sigh, half of a laugh.</p><p>“Sorry to disappoint you, boyo, but I only ever met one or two. Seemed pretty normal to me - course, we had a lot of them back in the glory days. Surgeons down here would do for them what couldn’t be thought of topside, not even in Denmark. It was a fairly major industry here in Rapture for a while, I’d say.”</p><p>Jack takes a second to absorb this new information. When he’d pictured them, he’d pictured outskirts. Dingy bathrooms. Maybe even jail cells. Not a well-known and familiar slice of the population, polished and honed to perfection. He keeps forgetting what Rapture’s like, a city that wears the seedy and scandalous like a badge of honour. Though, he thinks, that might be a bit unfair. For all the muck he’s waded through, there have been good people caught up and spat out of her jaws.</p><p>“What happened to them?” he asks. After all, there seems to be no trace of this supposed major industry left, which strikes him as strange.</p><p>Atlas seems to think for a second.</p><p>“Gone, I s’pose, or dead,” he says bluntly. “Same way as everyone else.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>Perhaps sensing his tactlessness, Atlas continues. “Listen, lad, the ones that got what they wanted left sharpish. Still enough people down here against them that they didn’t stick around. And the ones that did … spliced themselves to bits over their ill-fitting skins. But most of them got out.”</p><p>Jack nods. “Out?”</p><p>“Peach Wilkins smuggled them back up topside. Wasn’t like they were going to tell anyone where they’d been.”</p><p>Silence settles over the room. Jack looks at the span of his arm, clenches and unclenches a fist, imagines what it would be like to wear a body that fought you at every turn. It isn’t a pleasant thought. He wonders how far he’d go to escape it, if it were him in their shoes.</p><p>“Alright, boyo, that’s enough talk.” Atlas tells him. “There’s revenge to be had, and a city to be freed. Head on up to Ryan’s office now, if you please.”</p><p>Jack sighs, stretches, shakes off the last lingering trails of the whiskey. It seems his brief respite is over. He checks that his bandages are secured tight before pulling on his jumper and heading for the door.</p><p>“Good luck,” Atlas says from the radio at his hip. “Oh, and don’t ask me about them again, would you kindly. “</p><p>Jack goes.</p><p>*</p><p>The conversation with Atlas is still on Jack’s mind as he painstakingly goes about assembling Kyrbuz’s pulse bomb.</p><p>It was good, he thinks, to sit and talk. A lull in the storm that is his movements through Rapture. He wishes it had given him some more information on the man himself - Atlas is still an enigma to him, deceptively conversational and yet unwilling to give away much of his personal life. Jack can’t fault him that; he assumes it’s a habit born of years as a wanted rebel leader, and that what little he can talk of is too tangled up in Patrick and Moira not to sting.</p><p>He’s hazily worried he’d offended Atlas in some way; he hasn’t forgotten the man’s request, curt and vaguely discomforted as it seemed. The thought drifts into his mind to wonder why, but Jack shrugs it off. Why question it? Atlas asked him not to. Jack is happy not to push that boundary. It would seem ungrateful, and besides. He could be inadvertently stirring up more bitter memories of long-dead comrades, and that’s the absolute last thing he wants to do right now.</p><p>They’ll see the sunlight again, Jack vows. Both of them. Just this final push, and then they’ll both be free of their duties, and maybe then Atlas will be able to set down something of the terrible burden he carries. He’s a good man, and Jack wants to give him something good in return.</p><p>Part of him hopes for something more than that, after. But Jack is perfectly content to temper that hope with rationale. There’s more at stake than his personal feelings, and he’s as yet unsure of Atlas’s plans once Rapture is freed, where he fits into them. But he’s not worried. That same part of him knows that whatever he needs, Jack will be there, ready to help.</p><p>That however this ends, it’ll always be the two of them. Atlas and Jack, Jack and Atlas.</p><p>*</p><p>He can still taste blood in his mouth from where he bit his lip to bleeding, listening to Fontaine.</p><p>There’s some terrible feeling balled up in his chest, fury and betrayal and a bitter ache. It’s not something Jack’s accustomed to; nothing else he remembers ever hurt this much. It’s jarring to touch for too long, so he shelves it carefully somewhere within him and goes through the motions of loading and reloading his handgun, hacking terminals, heading toward the Metro Station.</p><p>It’s slow going. Code Yellow might have been scrubbed from his head, but Jack suspects that it’s left its mark on his heart. Phantom pains and shortness of breath stop him every few metres, leave him doubled over and breathing hard. Vita-chambers might help, but Jack’s not in a hurry to find out; even after this many times death still hurts.</p><p>The radio crackles; Fontaine likes to gloat when the cramps hit him, all <em>column A, column B, we were business partners, kid, think you’re some kind of hero?</em>  Mostly, Jack just braces himself and waits for the hurt and Fontaine to subside.</p><p>“Gotta say, kid, I’m impressed. Y’made it pretty goddamned far.”</p><p>There’s a Power to the People machine to his left. He limps toward it.</p><p>“Really got my money’s worth, huh. ”</p><p>He ignores the radio, spinning the dials on the machine that’ll allow him to upgrade his pistol. It’s not as fancy as a chemical bomb, but in the corridors and alleys of Rapture it’s good to have a weapon you can’t get caught in the blast range of.</p><p>“- think you’re a man, now, kid? Compensating with that gun a’yours?”</p><p>The pain subsides; Jack’s able to breathe again. He begins making his way through the winding streets, stopping occasionally to pick up the odd health kit. The radio is still chattering; Jack begins to entertain fantasies of hurling it against a wall until it’s nuts and bolts and silent. He’s still paying half an ear to it, though, in case Fontaine’s posturing inadvertently gives up some useful information.</p><p>The streets are eerily quiet.</p><p>Through the hissing distortion, Jack hears Fontaine’s voice drop low and poisonous, winding barbed tendrils into his ear.</p><p>“Course. Y’weren’t a man to begin with, oh no. We had to make you one.”</p><p>He stops short.</p><p>The security camera, anchored to the right of the building, swivels to face him. Whatever his intentions, this is clearly something Fontaine wants to see Jack’s reaction to.</p><p>“What,” he asks, voice carefully steady. “What do you mean?”</p><p>Fontaine laughs, rough and vicious. “What I <em>mean,</em> kid, is that when you came outta that test tube, y’didn’t come <em>out</em> a boy.”</p><p>The world tilts.</p><p>When it resettles, swims back into view, Jack is sitting slumped on the pavement, leaning on what remains of a marble entryway, still looking up at that camera. Everything is far, far too bright. He tries for breath and finds it escaping him, whistling through lungs that don’t currently seem to function. Blurrily, he thinks he can still hear Fontaine’s laughter.</p><p>“- says to me, they says, that you’re one a’those switchers. That you can’t eat, and y’can’t sleep, and you can’t <em>learn</em> nothing, because you’re too goddamned cut up about the body you’re in. A regular Christine Jorgensen - or the other way ‘round, I should say.”</p><p>Jack swallows, tries to speak, catches on his dry throat. His lungs are still misfiring.</p><p>“I don’t - I don’t understand,” he manages to choke out.</p><p>“I remember when you were a poor, pathetic little brat,” Fontaine tells him, “snivelling over your lack of a cock. Still. Twist of fate, maybe. Always thought you’d’ve been more use as a boy, and then y’go and turn out to be one.”</p><p>He gives an exaggerated sigh. “You would not <em>believe</em> how much it cost me, to do you up so good that noone’d ever figure it out. Worth it, though. You got what you wanted, I get a functional ace and not a wailing runt, all’s well with the world. Even let you pick your own name outta one a’Tenenbaum’s old fairy tales.”</p><p>Jack shakes his head, desperately. “I’d know, if that was - if that was true. I’d know.” He’s pretty sure he would, he thinks, that’s not the kind of thing you forget, but his mind keeps fixing on the knots of scar tissue just under his chest.</p><p>He can hear the edge of Fontaine’s smile, even through the radio. Lodged like a knife in Jack’s throat is how much the man seems to be enjoying this.</p><p>“That’s where you’re wrong, kid. Couldn’t have you getting to many opinions in that head. A weapon that thinks it gets to pick and choose its parts gets to thinkin’ it’s human. So. Would y’kindly forget, Jackie-boy, that you ever had anything different between your legs.”</p><p>Jack recoils, instinctively, from the command phrase. Nothing happens, thanks to Tenenbaum, but it doesn’t quell the tight grip panic has on his heart. Some part of him wants to bolt, and some part of him wants to calcify right there in the street, and the collision between the two shakes him with a terrible energy.</p><p>The voice over the radio drops soft and low, almost intimate.</p><p>“Don’t get me wrong,” Fontaine tells him. “I let you do it because it was convenient to me, <em>boyo,</em> not out of the kindness of my heart. But y’still owe everything you are to me.”</p><p>Clumsily, Jack reaches for a stone from the rubble that covers the street and hurls it at the camera, shattering its lens. It doesn’t stop the crackling laughter coming from the radio, but he’s got plenty of spare bandages that he winds round and round the speaker until any sounds that escape are muffled and indistinct. Then he shoves it about as far down as it will go into his trouser pocket.</p><p>He sits there on the pavement for a long, long time.</p><p>*</p><p>Jack doesn’t know how long he’s been stumbling through the corridors. One Splicer hurls themselves at him, then another; he avoids them clumsily, leaving the wall spattered with his blood and bodies in his wake. His aim is off for the first time he can remember. His hands won’t stop shaking. As far as Jack knows, he’s been looping the same hallways for the last … however long it’s been since Fontaine cut him open.</p><p><em>Girl,</em> he thinks wildly,<em> girl, I’m a - </em></p><p>Jack shudders, flinching back from the thought. It feels like a fever dream, mad and unbelievable - he knows he’s a man, somewhere deep inside and intrinsic. The idea that Jack’s body had other ideas, that it might still be waiting to turn on him, to transmute itself into something he doesn’t remember escaping makes his skin crawl. There’s a scream building inside him, clawing its way up his throat; he shakes his head wildly to clear it. Distantly, Jack hears a thin, moaning sound of pain, and realises it’s coming from him.</p><p>His hands go to his chest, checking that it’s flat. It’s an irrational fear, Jack knows, but he’s half-terrified that the surgery he doesn’t remember having will begin to undo itself now that Jack knows about it. He almost wants to bury that knowledge deep inside himself, to try to pretend that Fontaine was lying, but he thinks that avoiding it would only make it sharper. Jack wishes that there was someone to ask, someone who’d come to Rapture for the same thing; anything he once understood about what he is, he’d been made to forget.</p><p>There must be notes, somewhere. Books. Either in Rapture or above.</p><p>Jack forces himself to uncurl his arms from his chest. He focuses on the whistle of air from the vents that rushes past him, the sharp scent of petrol from a spill up ahead, the shouts of Splicers in the distance. Slowly and forcibly, Jack brings himself back to reality. The panic in his chest threatens to calcify him, but he clings to the responsibilities he’s taken on, to the Little Sisters, to Tenenbaum, to the city itself. There are things that he must do, Jack tells himself, and presses his feet into moving.</p><p>He heads down the corridor leading into Point Prometheus.</p><p>*</p><p>Tenenbaum has to hack one of the dilapidated television screens in the Prometheus lab to tell him to turn the radio back on again. Jack unwraps the bandages from it, but it stays where it is in his pocket and he winces every time he hears static.</p><p>Rapture is made up of an infinitude of mirrored surfaces. He’d never realised before how determined the city seems to be to reflect his face back to him, butter-soft and hazy in the silvered panelling. His reflection is strange to him now. Jack catches himself tilting his head in the dim light, checking, assessing, catching on cheekbone and mouth and eyelash.</p><p>It feels like another betrayal, that his body is so abruptly unsettling. He determinedly tries to focus on mapping out the terrain in his head, but his thoughts keep catching on his face. Jack turns to the map, trying to figure out where to go next, until he becomes aware that all the while his brain is again running a quiet panicked monologue of <em>too short</em> and <em>small hands</em> and <em>face too pretty?</em>  It’s all he can do to not smash things in frustration.</p><p>He’s taken to arranging and rearranging the line of his jumper where it sits on his hips. Something about the idea of people, of Fontaine, watching him makes him feel itchy and vulnerable, discomforted to the core.</p><p>Tenenbaum chimes in around the fifth time Jack winds up staring fixedly into a mirror.</p><p>“He has gotten into your head. It is difficult, but you must continue.” She sounds almost sympathetic.</p><p>He’d like to muster up the fury to be angry with her. For clearly knowing, and not telling him. He wishes he could burn with some kind of righteousness at that, but the slow, draining slog through Rapture has settled heavy in his bones. It leaves only a dull resentment that, yet again, there is someone who knows something that Jack doesn’t. Secrets seem to be the main legacy Rapture has left behind; piled up in alleyways and whispered into audio-logs and forged into a strangling chain around his neck.</p><p>The <em>Securis</em> door opens with a pneumatic hiss; Jack moves through into the halls beyond, beginning the usual methodical process of checking anything remotely capable of storage in his vicinity. He catches himself tugging at his jumper again, feels a sudden acute urge to cry, and presses his forehead to the wall in frustration. He can’t afford the time, but he doesn’t move.</p><p>The radio crackles on, and off again. It does this several times before Tenenbaum finally speaks.</p><p>“I knew someone,” she says, “like you. Brilliant scientist, brilliant woman. No less for being a transsexual.”</p><p>The wall is cool under Jack’s skin. He takes a breath, and then another.</p><p>He thinks that she is probably lying. Tenenbaum was never social; anyone she respected would have been a business colleague, and if there was anyone else caught up in this messy, tangled web he’d have heard their voice in audio logs by now. It doesn’t feel manipulative, though; more like an attempt to console him, however clumsily.</p><p>It is deeply, unexpectedly touching. They’re not friends, but he hopes that they could be. At the very least, that they carry enough pain in common for understanding.</p><p>Jack finds the security camera in the corner of the room, looks it squarely in the lens.</p><p>“Thank you.”</p><p>“No need,” she tells him, before coughing awkwardly. “Regardless. Bodysuit is just beyond next door.” The radio clicks off.</p><p>Jack nods, though he’s unsure if she’s still watching the cameras, and moves toward the door. <em>Transsexual,</em> Jack thinks. A word, for what he is. It’s not something he’s ready to shoulder just yet, but he turns it over in his mind and finds himself somewhat glad to have something other than slang, or euphemisms. <em>Transsexual.</em> Something within him settles, just slightly, just a little.</p><p>*</p><p>Keeping the Little Sister alive is the hardest part of the whole journey so far.  There’s a heart-wrenching moment in a waterlogged staircase, where he’s not sure he’ll make it to her in time as the Splicers close in - but Jack scoops her up with one hand and electrifies the water with another, and after that it’s all over.</p><p>She seems none the worse for wear because of it, though, giggling and skipping off humming what sounds like <em>Frère Jacques.</em> Jack’s torn between fond annoyance and worry for how fast she moves through the passages, calling to him to keep up. He wonders what her name was, before. If she still remembers it now.</p><p>He tries not to think about the implications of his body, and kids, though he suspects he knows the answer. It’s unlikely that he would be able to have children that are biologically his. It’s upsetting, in a strange way; Jack doesn’t think that he’d care for a child any less for it not being his, so to speak, but it’s yet another way in which his body is not what he thought it was. Another choice that was never his to make.</p><p>Once they’re free of Rapture, he’ll care for them, Jack decides. They’ll head for his farm in Kansas, so the girls will have a roof over their heads, and then he and Tenenbaum can look after them. It’s no trouble, really, and he wants to do right by them, in the way that the adults in their lives have not.</p><p>It makes him smile, unexpectedly, the thought of summer grass and cornfields and evenings spent preparing for school; mundane and idyllic. It’s a future that stretches out endless and hazy, a stark contrast to the immediacy of life in Rapture; to have something like it to look forward to, however indistinct, is welcome as he gets closer and closer to Fontaine.</p><p>*</p><p>The city gets more and more dilapidated as Jack ascends.</p><p>The walls are filthy, spattered with blood and other fluids, and the floors are encrusted with some dark stains he doesn’t want to think too much about. No one has been this far up in a long, long time; bar the initial few groups of Splicers, the place seems to be deserted. Fear of Fontaine, maybe. The sound of Jack’s footsteps echoes, high and lonely. He misses Atlas. It’s a bitter thought; one he tries to put out of his mind as he follows the Little Sister upward.</p><p>There are less mirrored surfaces up here, though, which Jack appreciates. It feels silly, really, to be afraid of his own face, but he still feels raw, his awareness of his body heightened in a way that seems unlikely to change. Jack wonders if topside, he could seek out others like him; there must be people out there that would understand. He has no idea what he’ll tell them - something about an accident, amnesia, maybe. Still, he’s afraid it won’t be enough. That he’ll never quite fit into what Jack thought he was, or what he knows he is.</p><p>The radio spits out static. He expects Tenenbaum, but gets only the faint strains of a man’s voice: <em>I seem to be what I'm not you see.</em> It’s on Fontaine’s frequency; petty and vicious and intended to taunt him. It worms its way into his head no matter how much Jack tries not to let it bother him.</p><p>The room he reaches at the end of the corridors is small and rounded, with a ceiling that weeps water. He picks his way across the floor, avoiding any stray electrical sparks; the lift waits just beyond. Jack sees the Little Sister over to her vent. He sends her back to Tenenbaum, and safety, before beginning his final preparations. When the radio crackles, he’s almost expecting it.</p><p>“Last chance to turn around, kid.” Fontaine’s voice is hoarse with plasmids. Jack bites down an old worry for the man on the radio.</p><p>“Y’know, it could still be you and me, if you stopped playing the goddamned hero. Y’don’t need to prove anything to me, kid, I know what you are. I <em>made</em> you what you are. Look at what I gave you. You owe me, body and soul, <em>boyo;</em> without me, y’couldn’t face down a mirror, let alone what’s waitin’ for you at the top a’that lift.”

</p><p>An icy paralysis creeps through Jack. His skin crawls, but with difficulty he manages to push it aside, gritting his teeth. He’s not going to let Fontaine exploit that again. One more EVE hypo in his belt, and he’s ready. Jack turns toward the lift.</p><p>“It’s a helluva deal I’m offering you,” Fontaine says, voice coaxing. “Come on, kid. Be my <em>right hand man."</em></p><p>Jack closes his eyes. He misses Atlas; in another world, these are longed for words. But it’s not a deal he’s willing to take. There’s too much that he wants, in that sunlight world far up above. Time to care for the girls, time to understand what it is to wear this body. To meet others like him. And he won’t be Fontaine’s creature, not now, not again.</p><p>Jack looks into the camera that watches his every movement. He’s sure that somewhere above him, Fontaine is reading the resolve written in every line of his face.</p><p>“You were always so goddamn stubborn,” Fontaine tells him. He sounds amused, almost fond. “Should’ve known you’d end up like this.”</p><p>Jack opens the lift door and steps in. His heart is pounding in his chest, but he’s ready, he thinks, to face the man above. And for whatever might come after.</p><p>It begins to move slowly upward.</p><p>“See you on the other side, kid,” Fontaine says.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title taken from the Oh Hellos's <em>Lay Me Down.</em> The song referenced later on is <em> The Great Pretender</em> by The Platters.</p><p>Inspired by one throwaway line from Dr. Steinman's audiologs. Specifically noting sex change operations made me think that they could be routine to him, so I got to wondering if Rapture might have become a badly kept secret among trans subcultures, as a place where you could go to get surgery and papers if you were wealthy enough and discreet enough. </p><p>Some notes:</p><p>- Apologies for any obvious mistakes; I have never been to Kansas, and am also not American. </p><p>- I was interested by the idea of Jack, a body made to be a weapon without an internal life, versus being transgender, which is so bound up in your personal identity, and how this might become another way in which choice factors into his life.</p><p>- Jack’s experience of dysphoria is heavily based on my own, though it differs in some ways, such as regarding children. This should not be taken as a universal portrayal of what transgender people experience. </p><p>- It matters to me that Jack’s body is not functionally cis; I’m handwaving the science on HRT as plasmids/ADAM-based surgical advancements, but Jack does have visible top surgery scars. I think of him as very isolated on his farm for the years above water, so he hasn’t really had the opportunity to notice anything different about his body, and I think that his mental conditioning would steer him away from any thoughts in that direction.</p><p>- There’s not a clear coming-to-terms with here because I don’t think he could in such a short time, but someday I may write a sequel where he copes with alienation due to lack of memories of transitioning, and ambivalence toward his body. Or a prequel. Who knows. </p><p>Thank you for reading. If you'd like to ask any questions, find me at @carterhaughao3 on tumblr.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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